Do you think it’s all a coincidence?
Main Cast: Yoon Jin-seo, Park Gi-woong
Director: Ki-hwan Oh
Each year there are movies produced that are never seen by the public. Their content is considered too graphic, too disturbing, too shocking for general audiences. This is one of those films.
Movie number eight in the After Dark Horrorfest III: 8 Films to Die For series is from South Korea, and is only the second Asian movie we’ve seen in this collection. VOICES, original title SOMEONE BEHIND YOU, is based on a comic book series, IT’S TWO PEOPLE, by Kang Kyung-ok. The story revolves around Ga-in Kim (Jin-seo Yun), a high school girl who seems to have a pretty decent life.
She’s got a younger sister she gets along great with, a boyfriend she loves, a best friend, she’s a talented fencer, and her parents seem kind and loving. Everything’s going pretty well for Ga-in, until the day of her aunt’s wedding. While everyone waits around the hotel lobby for the ceremony to begin, suddenly, from several stories up, Ga-in’s aunt is thrown over the balcony.
She survives the impact, but just barely. That night, after everyone except Ga-in and her boyfriend leave the hospital, another aunt sneaks into the room and finishes the job. There’s a funeral, the other aunt is taken to jail, and things should be settling back into some kind of normalcy. Except whatever evil had surrounded Ga-in’s aunt has attached itself to Ga-in herself.
Somehow, Ga-in has been cursed with the envy of others. Everyone around her seems to think everything would be perfect if Ga-in “would just die”.
I dug this movie, eventually. By the end, after I saw how everything came together, and I understood the plot as a whole, I really liked it. Granted, as I watched, I was trying to piece it all together, and failing. There were just huge chunks of this movie that didn’t seem to make any sense to me, but that could be because I kept getting the characters confused, it could be because something was lost in the translation (naturally I watched with the subtitles), or simple cultural differences didn’t register with me. In the end, however, I believe it was all a matter of storytelling ingenuity. VOICES purposely didn’t make total sense until that last five minutes, but when the reveal comes it’s a welcome and wonderful revelation. Oh, THAT’S what was going on, now I get it–that’s awesome!
There was plenty of gore for the fans, several shocking scream moments to make you jump, and absolutely NO long-straggly-haired ghost girls creeping across the room with backwards, cracking limbs. Thank God.
I liked the actors, although I get the feeling they were supposed to be playing much younger than they were. So-eun Kim, who played Ga-in’s younger sister, was 18 at the time, but I felt like she was supposed to be much younger, maybe 14 or 15. Jin-seo Yun was 24, but playing 17 or 18. I know a lot of American actors do the same, but in this case I just wasn’t buying it.
VOICES is a very well-made movie, and writer/director Ki-hwan Oh makes excellent use of everything at his disposal, from lighting to location, camera movement, and, in the end, editing–the last scene was shot beautifully and conveyed so much to the viewer while showing so little.
Unfortunately, I think this movie came along a few years too late and by then the American audience willing to sit for it had dwindled. The fad had passed, and only the real hardcore horror fans were going to bother, especially for subtitles. No one LIKES to read their movies; we do it because we want to see the movie, but it just happens to be in a different language. The average American movie-watcher just wasn’t interested. That’s their loss; VOICES is a really good movie.
I wouldn’t place it at the top of my Asian horror favorites, but that’s only because I’ve only seen maybe five Asian horror movies, not near enough to have a list of favorites. But it is one of the better-made and definitely the most easily understood story I’ve seen so far. By the end of this one, everything makes perfect sense. I can’t say the same for the more popular titles. JU-ON, for example; there were whole sections of that I didn’t understand, even watching it multiple times. I had to watch both of the first two American versions back-to-back before JU-ON made sense to me.
VOICES takes on the notion that RINGU and JU-ON reflect all there is to offer from the Asian horror market, and proves it wrong. We’re still dealing with a curse, naturally, but VOICES at least makes something of that curse, it’s not just a series of unfortunate incidences that play out from character to character until the curse is miraculously broken in the end.
VOICES actually offers a different, more interesting take on the curse story, one I didn’t expect. I went into this movie expecting the same old same old, but was, thankfully, rewarded with a movie that strives for that extra step, that doesn’t settle for just telling the same story over again. It had a confusing start, but in the end, VOICES was a pretty awesome movie.
Read more 8 Films to Die For reviews
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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